Radio India – Advertise yourself first

92.7, 105.8, 106.4 – wonder what this series is? Could you guess the significance of these numbers? These are the frequencies of newly launched radio stations in Chennai – Big FM, Radio city, Hello FM respectively. Some of you might have got it correctly, but I’m not a regular radio listener, so though I’m aware of all these channel names, I failed to associate the nos. to the channel.

Ever since the Govt. unshackled it’s tight control over radio and started issuing licenses to private players, this medium shows phenomenal rise, with new channels getting added on a regular basis. Radio offers distinct advantage to the advertisers, as it is possible to reach out to a specific regional or city audiences with a low cost. As the medium is voice based, there is no need for a top model to act or an exotic location to shoot or a Hi-Fi computer graphics to let your ad sizzle. A decent voice and a creative theme is enough here to capture the audience attention.

Also radio being less intrusive than other mediums like television or print, it can co-exist with people while they work, drive, cook, shop or relax. From the owners of contemporary luxury cars to the omnipresent auto walah’s in the cities , as well as the sundal sellers in their cycles along the beach side, it has its dedicated and well diversified listeners available throughout the day to market various products.

The problem here is the listener has to remember the nos. and manually tune in the right frequency, unlike it’s bigger cousin Television, where Cable providers take care of this frequency thing. With so many channels fighting for people’s attention, keeping all these nos in mind is not an easy task.Well, not any of them have a fancy number too. There are already 6 commercial radio stations operating in Chennai, and by next month one more channel, Radio One, promoted jointly by BBC and Mid-Day Multimedia is going to join the party. Most of these channels are based on hit songs of the regional cinema. So even if one want to tune into Radio Mirchi, but mistakenly connected to it’s competitor Suriyan FM, it would take some 5 or 10 mins till the channels promotion ad time, to realize that the frequency was set to the wrong station.

That shows how important is to make people remember the channels frequency. Simply repeating the nos. again and again in their channel won’t help, as competition is doing the same and listeners can get confused. They have to design creative concepts and show it visually so that it will get into the mind quickly. May be they can try making the nos. in a giant sized animated thing or by creating a story to link the channel with the number. Other option would be to create a song or jingle with a very good tune to popularize the frequency.

Or to make things simple, all the operators can join together and form a help line channel (100 or 91.1) that will have the list of channels and frequency to be tuned in. Listeners with net access don’t have to wait till this concept materialize. Already Asiawaves site has compiled a comprehensive list of all the FM players in India, which will be quite an useful guide to the radio audiences.

There are also community stations promoted by Anna University (90.4 MHz), Loyola college(90.8 MHz) operating in Chennai. But I wonder, whether they have enough listeners to keep on going?